Re: [RFC] [PATCH] kmem_alloc (generic wrapper for kmalloc and vmalloc)

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> Robert Love schrieb:
> 
>>On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 06:19 +0100, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>it seems there is a bunch of drivers which want to allocate memory as
>>>efficiently as possible in a wide range of allocation sizes. XFS and
>>>NTFS seem to be examples. Implement a generic wrapper to reduce code
>>>duplication.
>>>Functions have the my_ prefixes to avoid name clash with XFS.
>>
>>
>>No, no, no.  A good patch would be fixing places where you see this.
>>
>>Code needs to conscientiously decide to use vmalloc over kmalloc.  The
>>behavior is different and the choice needs to be explicit.
> 
> 
> Yes, but what do you suggest for the following problem:
> alloc(max_loop*sizeof(struct loop_device))
> 
> where sizeof(struct loop_device)==304 and 1<=max_loop<=16384
> 
> For the smallest allocation (304 bytes) vmalloc is clearly wasteful
> and for the largest allocation (~ 5 MBytes) kmalloc doesn't work.
> 

Can't you change it to use a hash or something?

Even a linked list if it is not performance critical.